hacks

...the conservative movement was largely a reaction to the New Deal, and the "ideas" that came forth to question the New Deal were mostly the product of corporate-funded think tanks like Heritage and The American Enterprise Institute that produce ideologically-driven shoddy work that demeans and discredits empirically sound social science.

Even the most prominent "intellectuals" associated with the GOP have tended to be hacks.

His examples of David Brooks and William Kristol are indeed hacktastic, but the rest of the right-wing op-ed industry (Glenn Beck, Tucker Carlson, Ann Coulter, Dinesh D'Souza, Newt Gingrich, Sean Hannity, Charles Krauthammer, Limbaugh the Larger and Limbaugh the Lesser, Dick Morris, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, and George Will) have been foisting the same destructive ideas on us for decades under the guise of newsworthiness.